Standards for the Growing, Harvesting, Packing, and Holding of Produce for Human Consumption or (SGHPHPH) for short

Normally as a rule I like to stay away from these types of posts. They tend to be dry, out of my niche, and they make my head want to explode. But yet I find myself here reading yet again about 500+ pages of impending rules from the same government that allowed glyphosate laced soybeans, and frog gene laced corn to become the norm.
It started on a normal Friday over coffee, when I came across this post from quarteracrehomehere, which brought to my attention this latest government acronym filled debacle. The link to which is here should you too choose to suffer a headache and near dead iPad.

Of the one hundred pages of five hundred plus that I have read so far, I have found that the writing is loose enough to allow plenty of abuse, and vague enough to be ignored by the bulk of the public, even as it slowly pushes them into the fantastic world of chemicals and GMO.

Right at the outset they have exempted small farms that make less than $25,000 per year. As shown here on page 8 lines 8-9

“The proposed rule would not cover farms that have an average annual value of food sold during the previous three-year period of $25,000 or less.”

But this begs the question, who is assigning the value to the food? Is it a True value? Or can they value a carrot at $30.00 to help this along? Another interesting take on this is here in a Huffington post article by Stacy Miller. She talks about the implications this rule change could have on small farmers. She gives a good example relating to farms that are at or above the threshold that wish to get into produce. Hop over and read it, it changed my perspective a bit.

Another aspect of this is the data that is used. It is two years old, that’s right 2011. Shown here from page 15 lines 2-4

“Each year, about 48 million Americans (1 in 6) get sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die from foodborne diseases, according to estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”

But why use 2011 numbers? A hypothesis if I may. The 2011 numbers may have been chosen for use because they show an increase over the 1996-1998 baseline across the widest spectrum of illnesses. 2010 and 2012 both show decreases across many illness types. The links to this data are below. Because hey, why let a good crisis go to waste?2010,2011, and 2013 CDC numbers

And the capstone to all of this could be the funding. This taken from page 14 lines 4-7

“We estimate the costs of the proposed rule to be $459.56 million annually for domestic farms, $170.62 million annually for foreign farms covered by the rule (for a grand total of $630.18 million annually), resulting in $406.22 million annually in estimated potential net benefits.”

This of course means that if one is capable of simple subtraction, the proposed rules would run at a net loss of $223.96 million dollars a year.

Folks, the examples that I have put out here are in the first 15 pages. Inside those pages there are countless methods for abuse and over reach. The next 85 pages outline studies that are described in a continuous repetitive nature, descriptions of all of the colleges that have already been given money to forward these rules, and the beginnings of a lot of fuzzy definitions of terms from earlier in the document. There are still 400+ pages I have not looked at.

While the bulk of the rules are geared toward industrial agriculture in mono crop settings, I do not think it will be long before smaller and smaller farms are the targets of restrictions like these.

Act now. Time and again our congressmen and representatives have shown through their actions and deeds that they simply do not care a hoot about the voters that have put them there. If you did not vote for them it is assumed by them that your opinions and thoughts are the minority, even as more and more of the voters that fell for their lines of bull wake up.

Act now. Build your communities build the bonds that will allow each of us to say no. Trade, barter, use alternative methods of payment. The more dependent on the dollar we are the bigger the boot on all of our throats.

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One comment

Thanks for this. The more we spread the word the better off we will be. The simple fact that after 120 days this issue is just NOW being brought to the public eye is bad enough. We should let our voices be heard. I’ve read enough law to know that it is a headache to try to piece together info from a document like this… I commend you for even getting as far as you have!